Looking for little habits in church processions

1of3Children in the garb of religious orders was a common practice in Catholic processions. In San Antonio, the Feast of Christ the King included a procession.Photo: Courtesy photo

2of3A doll in a religious habit is displayed in the lobby of the Village at Incarnate Word retirement community.Photo: Courtesy / Richard J. Dick McCracken

3of3Photo: /

Religious habits of old were studies in the unique. The Village at Incarnate Word retirement center has a lobby display case of some of them in miniature - nun dolls in the original (Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word) habits.… Makes me wonder how they survived the heat anywhere. In my day, on Mission Sunday, religious orders would make smaller versions for children for a traditional procession. I wonder if any readers have memories of those - with pictures.

− Richard J. “Dick” McCracken

If you went to the University of the Incarnate Word (formerly Incarnate Word College), worked there or wrote about the school during the past half-century or so, you will recognize the name at the end of this question. The late former dean of alumni relations, previously director of public relations, had the largest flock of any lay person I know of, and this columnist was blessed to be among them. Thanks to McCracken, I learned to like plum pudding, suet and all, and it was he who talked me down the time I got into richly deserved trouble with two orders of nuns on the same Sunday. Most important, he was unfailingly generous with his knowledge of all things Incarnate Word, Broadway, the headwaters of the San Antonio River and everything else he had learned about the city’s history during his time here.

He is one of the local-history stalwarts we lost in 2016, along with author John Igo and archivist/historian Marianist Brother Robert D. Wood. As with the questions I answered after Igo’s death last summer, I was saving this question for just the right time — in this case, the next World Mission Sunday, observed each year on the second-to-last Sunday in October, when churches celebrate their calling to help all the people of the world through mission clinics, hospitals, schools and other projects.

In San Antonio, the Feast of Christ the King — established in 1925 by Pope Pius XI and originally observed on the last Sunday of the month of October — was celebrated for decades with an annual procession from St. John’s Seminary to nearby Mission Concepción. As many as 10,000 of the faithful from San Antonio and surrounding towns participated at its peak, including students from Catholic schools, the cadet corps of St. Mary’s University, the Knights of Columbus, the children of St. Peter’s and St. John’s orphanages, members of religious orders and of men’s and women’s societies, and “others not identified with any society,” according to the San Antonio Express, Oct. 28, 1935. Clergy and acolytes bore banners and torches to accompany Archbishop A.J. Drossaerts to the mission church “where the Blessed Sacrament was held.”

These processions were held through the 1960s, as were observances of other feast days, school or church openings and similar solemn occasions, but news accounts don’t note that the schoolchildren were garbed as religious. McCracken, born in 1938 and brought up in New York, would have attended school from the mid-1940s to late ’50s. Anyone with memories or pictures of school processions in miniature religious habits during that time in San Antonio or elsewhere may share them with this column for possible future publication.

Survivor's note: Betty Dickinson of Tilden was prompted by a Dec. 11 column about Camp John H. Wise, the World War I observation balloon school in what’s now Olmos Basin Park, to share a letter from a young soldier stationed there. Writing to Dickinson’s great-uncle and great-aunt, Johnie F. Winters describes his experience of surviving one of the great modern plagues. “I have just had the Spanish influenza and believe me, it is something to have,” he writes on Oct. 21, 1918, during the height of the pandemic here, when soldiers from installations all over San Antonio were taken to the hospital at Fort Sam Houston to check its spread. “I laid in bed four days with an ice bag on my head, but there was a pretty girl that waited on me all day and a man at night. … I never seen as many sick people in my life as there was in the hospital, and it is full yet, but they are not getting sick so fast now. I think nearly all of the boys has done been sick and got well.”

While the flu would rage on through the end of the year, taking hundreds of local lives with it, Winters was one of the lucky ones, back on duty, just weeks away from the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice that would end the war. Writing from Camp Wise, the survivor was “learning to handle a machine gun … to guard the balloons.” They were “great big things … about 60 feet around. I was inside of a balloon the other day; sure looked funny.”

Winters survived the flu and the waning war and went on to live to age 64 as a rancher in McMullen County.

Blighted by light?: It’s a nice time to think about long summer evenings … unless you miss one of the bygone pastimes of that time of year. Reader Jeffrey Berler wrote in response to a Nov. 27 column about South Side drive-in movie theaters, in which outdoor impresario Arthur Landsman was quoted. “My late father-in-law, Richard Landsman (known to all as “Dickie”) took over Statewide Drive-in Theaters upon the death of his father Arthur Landsman,” Berler says, noting that the younger Landsman attributed the ultimate cause of the drive-ins’ demise to the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which led to the standardization of daylight saving time. “When clocks sprang forward, it made it impossible to have more than one show a night, as the screen would not be dark enough,” says Berler, who manages the South Park Plaza Shopping Center across from the former site of Statewide’s South Loop 13 drive-in. With the later start times, “Families, a large segment of the audience, would be home in bed by the time the first reel was threaded into the projector.”